Gay marriage and the Constitution
There’s been a lot of news traffic lately about gay marriage. One side of the issue is the “It will destroy America from the roots up.” Another stance is the “I just don’t really care” position, and that appears to be true for a lot of people. All sorts of folks get married all the time; some are pretty, some are not-so-pretty, some are smart, some are dumb as rocks, some have money, some are flat broke. People get married for a lot of different reasons as well; some get married for love, some marry for money, some marry for fame and celebrity, some marry due to unplanned pregnancy, and some marriages are even arranged. Each person disagrees at some point with one or more of these occurrences, but the types of people that marry continue to vary as much as their reasons for doing so, and nobody blinks any eye. Why? Because it’s none of anyone else’s business. Some could argue that if the government could legislate who gets married and who has children the world would be a better and less overpopulated place, but nobody would dare suggest restricting marriage or child bearing. That’s what India and China do, and how dare we, as Americans, subject our brethren to such archaic restrictions, right? Yet this is exactly what the current government is doing by presenting an amendment to the constitution banning gay marriage. The government and those citizens who support this action are deciding who can and cannot get married.
A source of confusion and concern is the fact that people don’t see what’s happening as discrimination, and they don’t see the similarities between this and racial segregation. Black people couldn’t vote, they couldn’t have the same jobs, they couldn’t ride the same buses or attend the same colleges because they were viewed as different and substandard humans. This was a stereotype, it was a prejudice, it was discrimination, and it was wrong. Women’s rights were the same way. They couldn’t vote, and women in the workplace were frowned upon. A woman’s place was in the home with the oven and babies. Again, a stereotypical discrimination. To resolve each of these issues our entire country fought battles akin to civil war, and over time segregation and discrimination lost. It would be difficult to find someone these days who firmly believes that the actions of the past were sound and just, but here we are, as a country, repeating our history page by page.
The fact is that some people are gay. Maybe they were born gay, maybe they were raised gay, maybe they chose to be gay, or maybe aliens implanted rainbow-colored microchips in their heads. It’s an interesting psychological puzzle, and an interesting social issue, but that’s all it should be. It shouldn’t be a legislative issue, and banning gay marriage certainly shouldn’t be written into the Constitution of the United States, a document which was designed to ensure freedoms, not restrict them.